Abstract
Social ontology examines the nature and mechanisms in human society of concepts that pertain to various kinds of social collectivities. A pioneer in the development of this philosophical field, Mills theorised a social metaphysics of racial constructivism for modern philosophy in order to explain the enduring orthodoxies of its Anglo-centric dominance. This paper invokes the term, supervenience, to further elucidate the causal bearing of race on individual and social facts. Turning to the philosophy of education, the ontological bifurcation of asymmetrical racial worlds is a salient divide to which discourses of normative individual ethics, analytic critical thinking, and generalized social justice contribute. Given the pervasiveness of supervenience, in the unwillingness to traffic in the ontology of race, educational philosophy hamstrings the creative and critical dimensions of advancing education for a racially equitable and pluralistic democracy.
The rethinking of familiar categories in the light of their imperial genealogy, the admission of new categories that illuminate structures of domination not registered in the official lexicon, the complicating of standard narratives, would open up the cognitive field of the discipline’s current self-conception so as to make possible a genuine self-knowledge that current orthodoxies – given the need to evade the past – preclude. In this revised framework, a real dialogue of equals could take place that would better be able to address and begin the remedying of the legacy of the Euro-polity, thereby giving the appropriate respect and justice to the ‘non-political’.
Introduction
In matters of race, Charles Mills maintained fidelity to his role as political philosophy’s de facto gadfly of the late twentieth century and beyond. A primary theme was that the exclusion of Black intellectual thought from the canon was evidence of the field’s Western European bias and the waning credibility of its grand contractarian ideal. Echoing Dipesh Chakrabarty, Mills maintains that the philosophical divide is an ‘ontological bifurcation’ according to racially based norms and calls for efforts to provincialise whiteness and bolster an ‘ideology revisionist project’ with commensurate theorising space for ‘non-Western political traditions’ (Mills, 2021: 33). Mills theorises the metaphysics of racialised consciousness in society as a form of social ontology and calls for a transformation in the current understanding and usage of the terms of race.
In characterising Mills’ account as one of the supervenience of the social fact of race on individuals and in the social world, this paper brings Mills’ ontological conception to bear on the academic philosophy of education. It is argued broadly that there is ontological bifurcation along racial lines in the field. It is a divide that consigns interchange about racial equality to White liberal progressive discourses of individual normative ethics or a nebulous social justice of redress. In the unwillingness to traffic in the ontology of race, educational philosophy hamstrings the creative and critical dimensions of advancing education for a racially equitable and pluralistic democracy. Critical thinking is one philosophical domain in which to explore the consignment of matters of race to the periphery of the discourse and to reorient the geography of reason to take racial constructivism into account (Gordon, 2020).
A social ontology of race
Mill’s social ontology relates metaphysical questions to racial categorisations that are designations of group associations by phenotype or ‘bodily appearance’ in Western society. 1 This section presents Mills’ racial constructivism and explains its derivation from two sources. First, he draws on opposing stances on the nature of reality in the classical metaphysics of substances or immaterial and material objects and their kinds. Second, reconciling these accounts theorises that race has real concomitant effects that work through social mechanisms. Beginning with Mills’s (1994) groundbreaking early work, he invoked the term ‘race’ to refer to the racial system under which we exist as having ‘its dynamism and autonomy, its own peculiar social ontology’ (p. 117). The purpose of this section is to articulate Mills’s general social ontology and its attendant metaphysics of race.
Social ontology is that subfield of philosophy that concerns social facts, objects, processes, or events (Searle, 1995, 2006). Mills’s pioneering examination of race as a manifestation of the social world holds that race is both a social kind and a natural one. 2 The early taxonomic categories of Mills’s social ontology included distinguishing an ‘objective’ understanding of race from the opposing ‘anti-objectivism’ as the two primary subdivisions. The subcategories of objectivism are ‘metaphysical realism’ versus ‘constructivism’. For the latter, there are underlying orientations of ‘subjectivism’, ‘relativism’, and ‘error theory’ (Mills, 1998: 45). This social ontology theory is the metaphysical architecture with which Mills develops his philosophical framework of race. 3 Blackness Visible:
Essays on Philosophy and Race is Mills’ (1998) complete work of social ontology that articulates the emergent questions along the lines of Searle’s (1995) inquiry into modalities in which social objects are natural. Mills (1998) writes, The terms social ontology and social metaphysics (I will use them interchangeably) have a certain intuitive transparency, being meant to refer to the basic struts and girders of social reality in a fashion analogous to the way ‘metaphysics’ simpliciter refers to the deep structure of reality as a whole. So there are basic existents that constitute the social world, and that should be central to theorising about it. Thus one readily understands what it means to say that the social ontology of the classic contractarians is an ontology of atomic individuals; that for Karl Marx, it was classes defined by their relation to the means of production; and that for radical feminists, it is the two sexes. In pre-postmodernist times, these categories would have been confidently put forward as part of foundationalist and theoretically exhaustive explanatory schemas – history as class or gender struggle. (p. 44)
Pivotal in this turn to metaphysics was the notion of ‘atomistic individualism’, and the persisting invisibility it lends to any collective responsibility for colonialism. The individualism to which Mills refers applies to moral agency and maps to ontological individualism, according to which facts about individuals and individuals alone determine the social world (Epstein, 2009). Thus, the percipient facts, rationale, and stratagems of the major theatres of Western Europe and colonial exploitation of the Global South are absent from the theories of political society, such as the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and, of the late twentieth century, Robert Nozick and John Rawls. These political theorists posit an idealised rational being as the autonomous subject of political rights in virtue of and solely because of its essentialized capacity to reason. Other than the crown’s edicts or the sovereign’s power in relation to their subjects, there were no collectivities, conjoined social group or action to acknowledge as responsible actors or entitites.
Given these social ontology categorisations, Mills rejects a naturalistic ‘racial realism’ because it is counter to scientific consensus in anthropology and biological sciences. On the other hand, his earlier writings denied the eliminative view on race, ‘which fails to do theoretical justice to race, with race being seen as an irrelevancy to the ontology of the liberal individual, or the class membership of workers and capitalists’ (Mills, 1994: 109). As he would state in multiple articles, another basis for rejecting eliminativism was the work of W.E.B. Du Bois l (1997 [1903], 1992 [1903]) and the seminal rendering of the ontological dilemma of a ‘double consciousness’ of American descendants of enslaved people in the society of the United States. These explorations of the reality, demarcation, and conditions of race were crucial forerunners of the nomenclature of the social ontology field.
Mills crafts an ontology of racial constructivism (RC), which he describes as ‘a kind of epistemically idealised’ account of the effects of race that generates and maintains political status (Mills, 1994: 47–48). On this view:
There can be social causation as a byproduct of the passage of history.
There are material and non-material social and individual manifestations of race, R.
The realness of R stems from being the social counterpart to a natural metaphysic that arises ‘out of social history’ (Mills, 1994: 48).
The contention above, hereafter, racial constructivism’s reasoning or RC reasoning offers an argument for the social materiality of race. Race operates in ways that are not reducible to the actions of individual bodies or facts about them. Further the various social categorisations of race can be predicated of a group that shares a common marker of, for example, R1 or R2, where R1 relates to persons who are White, and functionally non-raced and R2 relates to persons who are raced and functionally sub-persons (Mills, 2011). The effects of race, individually, in whole, or in part, cannot be traced solely back to the thoughts or actions of the racially embodied person or persons. In this sense, race is at once ‘constructed’ in that it is the contingent product of human society and derives its meaning from this construction, but in another sense, race is ‘real’ nevertheless in that this racialization does have material consequences for such persons and the society in general.
On Mills’ view, RC reasoning also details the social mechanism by which the social world has produced categories of asymmetrical sociopolitical and moral status for R1 versus R2, as painstakingly detailed in Mills’ (1997) Racial Contract. The derivative conclusion of RC reasoning, which follows from statements 1-3 above is the following:
Political history globally constituted substantive and bifurcated racial categories of implicitly racialised persons (R1) who are White but functionally non-raced and racialised sub-persons (R2) who are non-white.
There are unspecified aspects of the interaction of the sociality of race with personal effects as two classes of distinct things or modalities of existence and being, in Mills’ account, which conceptualisations in current ontology scholarship can elucidate. Racial constructivism suggests that there are bidirectional effects in-play in the enactment of the ontology as a result of determinative historical events. It is a claim that suggests the following:
(4) Lemma I: R1 and R2 are interrelated such that: R1↔ R2
By the bidirectional arrow it is meant for the remainder of the paper that racial constructivism implies, as a consequence of political history, that R1 can only exist if R2 exists. Not only does race manifest as a R1 and R2 distinction but also R1 co-constitutes R2 and the converse. The metaphysical and material effects of race are interactive, mutual, and intersubjective. The distinction is sustained in and through their interaction. For the exposition to follow, persons under R are ‘participants’. 4 The term indicates they are part of a world with both material and non-material attributes but ontologically bounded by these racial categories because of the antecedent causation of political history, as racial constructivism maintains. The ‘participation’ construal also gestures to the fact that the association with the marker is not solely a matter of the will but a contingent fact of meeting the socially designated conditions for R1 or R2 and their disctinctions.
The R1 and R2 interrelation helps to formulate questions about race’s individual and physical materiality and the mechanism of its social effects. The case can be made that these are inquiries into a general metaphysical problem of the nature of particular social kinds that have a conceptual referent but not a definitive material referent (Hindriks, 2013). Examples of the kinds of questions are as follows:
How can R1 participants materially impact events or conditions affecting R2 without R1 participants being present?
If R1 participants have material economic conditions in common with R2, then how can the former be said to dominate the latter?
How can participants of R1 enact domination without intent and R2 participants be complicit in their own subordination?
Thus far, this paper has been interpreting Mills’s social ontology of race that the thesis of racial constructivism implies. The questions above pertain to the ontological workings of race such that the social sphere and individual consciousness of White participants of R1 affect the comparable realms of individual non-white or Black participants of R2 and the converse. Situating race within the general category of social kinds, as is done below, can elucidate the theoretical efficacy of racial constructivism.
Racial constructivism and the supervenience of race
In social science, concepts like ‘organisation’, ‘institution’, and ‘generations’ provide examples of entities that, like ‘race’, are made up of their members but are not identical with their members. Metaphysically, concepts like these raise questions about the identification of the entity with its membership and the legitimacy of claiming the actions of its members as representing the whole (Hindriks, 2013). They are socio-conceptual wholes in this regard, as is stipulated by name, and it is proposed that race (R) is a socio-conceptual whole. This section provides the broad outlines of these wholes and their bearing on individual facts. The aim is to underscore the ordinariness of a social category like race, while arguing for the extraordinariness of the social mechanism that leads to racialised and racist material effects in U.S. culture and institutions.
The supervenience of social facts in matters of race
Mills’ racial constructivism sheds light on the presence of a condition that traverses through the entire society and that he argues brings about the harmful effects of persisting social inequality and an incipient racial hierarchy. Association with each group predisposes one to external material conditions or social status and internal divergent thought processes based on differential experiences in the world. Racial constructivism has ramifications for an educational imperative of corralling the best resources of science and philosophy to overcome the social problems that race has produced. However, its ontological mechanisms are unspecified. It can be maintained that methodological holism provides a philosophical explanation of the way that social facts supervene on the sphere of the individual mind in such a way as to explain the workings of race.
The metaphyscs of supervenience offers one possible account of the relationship between the individual as an agent or person and associated facts and the social considerations that can have material effects (Epstein, 2009: 189). In philosophical circles, supervenience is ‘a term of art’ that merely should have a stipulative meaning; however, clarifying the use of the term sheds light on the kind of relations being referenced (Leuenberger, 2009, p. 171). Supervenience relates to a ‘modal force’ in which one thing (X) affects another (Y) (Hindriks, 2013: 431). In philosophy and metaphysics accepting an ontology that assumes an ‘autonomous’ social sphere and related social facts is understood to be a belief about ontological individualism (Epstein, 2009). Ontological individualism entails that when two objects, worlds, or events have the same individual properties, they must have the same social qualities so that there is no change in X without a change in Y (Dreier, 2019). In this dependence of the social on the individual, there is generally held to be a one-to-one relation (Hindriks, 2013). Concomitant with ontological individualism is the view that social facts are reducible to individual ones which implies an individual supervenience.
Alternatives to ontological individualism (e.g. ontological holism) generally are unfavourable because of the association with prioritising the social will over the individual one (Hindriks, 2013). However, it is argued that social facts clearly influence individual actions of people and, as such, leave open modalities that maintain ontological individualism and that do not entail a one-to-one interaction in social facts on states of affairs (Currie, 1988; Epstein, 2014). 5 To invoke supervenience on a methodologically holistic basis is to maintain that, while change in social facts may be due to change in individual circumstances, it does not necessarily imply that the underlying facts are the same. So the individual causations that lead to racial manifestations are not the same ones that move racialised understandings. Conceiving race as a member of the ontological kind to which such social facts belong is one major step towards seeing its social performance as unexceptional in this regard.
The ontology of socio-conceptual wholes like race
While Hindriks (2013) concedes that ontological individualism obtains, there is a problem with the location of social entities that exposes a theoretical weaknesses in the account. As such ontological individualism does not provide a satisfactory formulation of its constituent members and their discrete representation of the social entity in isolation. Hindriks (2013) includes entities such as ‘organisations’ or ‘institutions’; other examples are categories such as ‘generations’ and R. Each is a social entity in which associated members are not co-located with the ‘location’ of the entity. The idea is that while ontological individualism at its most straightforward means that contemporary theories posit an ontological one-to-one relation of the individual and the social, they presuppose that the underlying social laws or mechanisms are local, possibly to inhere in the entity physically or through an identified social mechanism that can be reduced to individual components. These socio-conceptual wholes have no fixed location but elicit individual actions to represent the social unit over and beyond the aggregate and therefore as a whole; further, induction into their association can come through social means.
Hindriks (2013) provides a non-reductive account of the constitution of these entities that aligns with our intuitions about the difference between the institution, and social entities or concepts, like R, and their members. This ‘Enactment Account’ allows entities to separate from their constituting objects, which denies solely a local form of supervenience. The account can be generalized to other social entities (e.g. electronic money). Hindriks writes that this ‘“Status Account of Institutions,” as I shall call it, paves the way for answering further ontological and methodological questions . . . I argue that the social does not supervene only on the individual but on the physical as well’ (p. 415). Similarly, as social facts, R1 and R2 exist apart from but still supervene on their participants and the associated artifacts and cultural symbols to imply distinct conceptual wholes.
The methodological holism of R
Having established that ontological individualism entails more than local supervenience, particularly for social entities with constituents, the question remains of how R operates through participants to bring about these effects. Methodological holism allows the claim that in the interaction between R1 and R2, multiple permutations of causation exceed the individual-one-to-one relation so that the social is not reducible to the individual agent, event, or other action.
(4) Lemma II: R1 and R2 are interrelated such that: R1(mental & physical events) ↔ R2(mental & physical events)
In the RI and R2 co-constitution there are individual and social, mental and physical manifestations of RI that can cause parallel manifestations of R2. Viewed individually, for any R1 participant there are mental and physical events upon which the social fact of race supervenes in historically determined R1 ways. These mental and physical events can interact with counterpart domains of facts as they pertain to material and mental effects of R2, upon which race supervenes in R2 ways. The converse also applies, but there is no intention to suggest symmetry. Intersubjectively, R supervenes in the interaction between the linked mental and physical properties and events between R1 and R2 participants. These include beliefs, emotions, and affects (Epstein, 2009). Since Pettit (2003), it has been a generally accepted belief that social factors influence minds, even given his commitment to ontological individualism of some kind.
6
The thesis of methodological holism holds that at least some ‘social facts or events can be (or are best)explained in terms of other social facts or events concerning individuals (and physical objects) and their properties’ (Hendriks, 2013, p. 431) and that ‘given their irreducibility, institutional entities can play an essential role in social explanations’ (Hendriks, 2013, p. 435). As Hindriks (2013) explains, I go on to defend and illustrate methodological holism . . . I also argue that, despite its holist implications, the Enactment Account of the Constitution enables me to make sense of the idea that social causation inheres in individual agents. Thus, my attempt to solve the Location Problem results in a forceful argument favouring non-reductive materialism and methodological holism about the social. (p. 415)
As methodological holism pertains to R’s supervenience, associated facts and actions engendered are irreducible to individual Rs exclusively in their bearing on the way of life and ordinary practices of all members of U.S. society.
In conjunction with methodological holism, this metaphysical apparatus of ontological individualism suggests global supervenience at work in the social facts of race. These concepts jointly provide an account of the differential social status of racial permutations and their social reproduction for the RC reasoning of Mills’s racial constructivism. To be determined are the mental and physical mechanisms by which R operates as a social causal force (even if individuals do not always enact it). To such a social condition would be attributed not only the original establishment of the R1 and R2 distinction but a plausible social process that reproduces differential material effects even independent of the individual will of participants. Doing so means identifying a metaphysics of relation to theorise one’s understandings, perspectives and enactment of race being influenced by the physical marker of both one’s own race and that of one’s racial counterpart. It is the essential process inherent to Mills’ racial constructivism that also circumvents the disfavored ontological holism. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to fully elaborate on these social mechanisms, preliminary treatment of the aforementioned questions can shed light on the supervenience that is possible.
How can R1 participants materially impact events or conditions affecting R2 without R1 participants being present?
Methodological holism as a component of global supervenience elucidates the social significance of artefacts, institutions, and rituals, as associations of group participation in respective racial categories. Race supervenes upon these objects as an associated extension of the expected, anticipated, or incipient value or significance of group participation. This explication helps with the question of the bearing of race on events as conditions in the absence of participants of both markers. Arguments that link social policies, traditions, and social ‘norms’ to respective Rs would make this case.
It is maintained that in keeping with global supervenience, the R1 and R2 interaction is one of being tethered to each other so that where one supervenes on individual facts it is always also in relation to the other. In keeping with ontological individualism, the individual causations emanate based on the marker in which the person participates but also the meaning of R1 tethered to the meaning of R2 in relation to each other. The material effects of the supervenience of the social facts of race on individual racialised manifestations give rise to multifarious racial understandings related to R1 and R2 separately and distinctly as part of an individual’s consciousness, inclusive of affects and reasoning.
(4) Lemma III: R1(R1↔R2) ↔R2(R1↔R2)
This statement underscores the claim stated earlier that each iteration of R entails the other one. Moreover, whether pertaining to individual or social facts, to inhabit one permutation is to, by default, do so in relation to the other. According to this formulation there is a form of supervenience that is exclusively the social ontology of supervenience of Whiteness and Blackness in co-constitution that will always have historical provenance in US history. This claim can address the following question:
How can participants of R1 enact domination without intent and R2 participants be complicit in their own subordination without their consent?
Lemma III explains both parts of this question in that the R1↔R2 relation is always a supervening variable as a social fact with which each participant must directly or indirectly contend; this relation reveals itself as tacit and overt white supremacy, which historically is rooted in global and national political events.
If R1 participants have material economic conditions in common with R2, then how can the former be said to dominate the latter?
Similarly social status does not alter the global supervenience of these social facts. 7
Racial polity and raced individuals
Thus far, the paper’s argument has been that racial constructivism incorporates an existing social ontology of two co-constituted categories of persons. In this section, counter to White liberal progressive thought in philosophy and education, the necessary provincialising involves philosophical acknowledgement of the social ontology of Whiteness and Blackness as operationalized in RC reasoning. The focus is on Mills’ assertion that ‘White liberal progressives’ in the United States fundamentally misread the R1 to R2 relation. I relate Mills’ discernment to a particular demographic of the White academic elite, who are philosophically adjacent to John Rawls in their analysis of social inequality as being a question of providing fair opportunity and economic redress. Mills strongly recommends an entire program of coming to terms with all of the social facts of race in addition to the ongoing activism for social justice, rights and democracy.
Reconfiguiring normative political philosophy
Political philosophy is the primary academic and disciplinary target of Mills’ critique, which is that architects of the late twentieth-century political liberalism, such as John Rawls’ and his theory of justice, do not accommodate the hierchical workings of race in their philosophical formulations of political consent, rule or rights (Mills, 2021). Whether through European imperial colonialism or White settler advancements on the North American continent, he writes that the: colonising power and its citizenry are themselves shaped by these relations of domination and exploitation. It is not just an exploitative transfer of wealth and resources that is involved, but the transformation of moral psychology, the birth of ‘whiteness’ as a social category and its formation in relation to nonwhiteness across the ocean . . . for the conceptions of self, sociopolitical frameworks . . . (Mills, 2021: 25)
White progressive liberals feature as prominent interlocutors in this ontology for a bevy of reasons; their alternate conception of race as asymmetrically relevant to non-white persons only and one of a range of identities, as Mills argues, contributes to the dominance of White racial ideology. The resulting political imaginaries of representation reflect ‘ecologies of social ignorance’ in various forms that undermine generative political contestation and social progress (Mihai, 2022).
While not a monolith historically or socially, this label of ‘White liberal progressives’ refers generally to loosely allied academics, thought leaders, and pundits, who advocate for an expansive federally- funded social safety net on various philosophical and economic grounds. Influences on this way of thinking variously include Marxist-inspired critical theory, Foucault’s theory of power and, to a lesser extent, Gramsci’s notion of hegemonic ideology and subaltern resistance; however, it is with the Rawlsian project of federally supervised distributive justice that liberal democracy underwrites that they rest politically. The White liberal progressive, in securing an ‘oppositional status’, initially eschewed the movements that framed the struggle for social equality in terms of the particularities of racial identity but also gender (dubbed the ‘politics of identity’) in society and as did multicultural education.
A theoretical hybridisation occurred by bringing critical theorists’ interpretation to inform theoretical frameworks such as ‘critical multicultural education’ and critical social justice. Mills’s racial contract theory builds on this oppositional framing philosophically to make a case for global white supremacy being the most consequential political ideology of our time. Mills’s argument was that white supremacy not only produces a racial polity but also requires the deploying of political reasoning that grapples with its pervasiveness, because ‘concept application and cognitive judgment are learned through examples drawn from racially asymmetrical data fields and with radically divergent background theoretical assumptions’ (Mills, 1998: 150–151). Mills took issue with the inclination of White liberal progressives to overlook their own racialization in the quest to get beyond the harms of racism.
Many white liberals (and, indeed, historically, many white Marxists also), aware of the verdict of science on race, are puzzled at black intellectuals’ retention of race as a significant social category: they wish to move from the falsity of racial realism to global claims about the unreality of race in general, and the corollary political mistakenness of race-centred political discourse such as one finds in black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Afrocentrism. (Mills, 1998: 47)
A proper reading of the political demands of the late twentieth century and onward, Mills argues, takes the social ontology of mutuality of racial categorization (R1↔R2) seriously. One aim would be to reimagine just institutions reconfigured for the recalcitrance of race. Doing so, at least partly, derives from theorising a co-labour relationship in a bifurcated ontology of separate but mutual tasks for the respective forms of racialized consciousness.
Decentering white racial ideology
Initially a Marxist scholar, Mills appreciated the compelling framing of ideologies, particularly as they leveraged the historical trajectory of a nation or people He was clear that modernity introduced ‘moral-political hierarchies,’ ‘antiegalitarian ideologies,’ and ‘absolutists’ that were precursors to the racial hierarchies today. Therefore, race, racism, and ideology were inseparably linked. Mills (2000) underscores the importance of political liberals taking social ontology seriously such that they jettison the view of themselves as ‘colourless (i.e. White) atomic individuals’ (p. 458). This realisation follows the acknowledgement ‘that notions of respect for personhood have been systematically raced’ (Mills, 2000: 458). This non-raced, atomistic individual does not create the intellectual conditions to investigate, theorise, and overcome the social pathologies of white supremacy. To do so requires a conception of race as a relation (R1↔R2). If it is the case, colonialism manifested and established individualism, control over sub-persons’ bodies and rationalised power. It is therefore incumbent to excavate this belief system: Once this expanded moral topography has been acknowledged, and not evaded or defined out of existence, it immediately becomes obvious that the transactions in moral and political space are far more complicated, involving many other dimensions, than those sketched in the standard First World cartography. Focusing exclusively on the lateral person-to-person relations of the ideal Kantian population, mainstream theory misses the dense vertical network of the person-to-sub-person relations and also elides the ways in which even the horizontal relations are structured by their repositioning concerning the latter. (Mills, 1994: 103)
This passage expresses the aspirational project that centring the R1 and R2 relation incorporates, and it is an invitation to explore their part to play from within this framing. An example of this project was his discussion in ‘Race and the Social Contract Tradition’, where he argued for the contractarian model of political morality but through the normative lens that the social facts of group domination introduced. Such a perspective does ‘a better job of modelling the real-life workings of the formal juridico-political apparatus of the polity’ (Mills, 2000: 452). These kinds of transgressive projects are the ones to which he invites White progressive liberals.
Philosophy and education: Shifting the geography of reason
Mills’s social ontology of race and its particular message to White liberal progressives offer a rich source of reflection for the philosophy of education field. As Mills (2021) reported in a cursory review of the tables of content for introductory and advanced anthologies in his field of political philosophy, they indicated the need for rigorous scholarship from the Global South on these essential topics of meaning and barriers to political society. While it can be said that Black and brown philosophers of education are more visible and their work more generally accessible, than in political philosophy, yet to be seen are widely accepted formal scholarship that draws on this research on its own terms. This section argues that the role of education in advancing social knowledge places a moral burden on philosophers of education in a democratic society to weigh and take into account the ramifications of racial constructivism. The section applies this rationale to critical/analytical/pedagogical gifts of critical thinking as reasoning in a racialized social ontology.
Shifting the geography of critical thinking
Academic philosophy about educational aims, the political significance of schools, the teacher’s role and valued curricula exhibit Mills’s primary contention of a racially bifurcated political philosophy. The relevance of race surfaces in educational equity, the justificatory basis (or not) for multicultural education, particularly as it applies to racial and ethnic inclusion more broadly and, of late, critical race and Whiteness theories, respectively. Moreover, social justice has figured prominently in education theory and philosophy for the last three decades. Generally absent as subjects of analysis are the asymmetrical lived experiences that circumscribe racial group membership beyond notions of privilege. Applying a social ontology of racial constructivism to one work of philosophy of education, Harvey Siegel’s (2017) Education’s Epistemology, is instructive. Such an application illustrates that teaching students to reason well should bring forward the R1↔R2 relation to overcome the cartographies on which modern epistemology is based. Doing so offers a meta-criticality of its standard norms of critical thinking as a democratic aim of education. Racial constructivism demands a remedy and the analytic tools provided in its social ontology.
That society should ‘regard critical thinking’ as a fundamental educational aim of schools in realizing democracy is the main thrust of Siegel’s (2017) work. In the first chapter, Siegel offers a straightforward statement of the text’s thesis that ‘to regard the cultivation of reason as a fundamental aim or ideal is to hold that the fostering in students of the ability to reason well and the disposition to be guided by reasons is of central educational importance’ (Siegel, 2017: 5). Fostering rationality definitively animates critical thinking, and it comports with the norm ‘that educational activities ought to be designed and conducted in such a way that the construction and evaluation of reasons are paramount throughout the curriculum’ (Siegel, 2017: 5). The concept is normative because conforming to reason is self-evidently justified and justifiable. One can concur with the preeminence of reason as an educational value along these lines while offering friendly amendments to foreground potential areas of its misapplication.
Education in a democratic society should create citizens prepared not only to reason but also to make sound judgements. The latter aim incorporates advancing an inclusive, just and liberal society. A corollary thesis is that not doing so can support and reproduce regimes of oppression. It can be argued that critical thinking that only attends to the rationality of propositions and their formal and informal logic can impose limits on reasoners’ scrutiny of claims, when racial constructivism is not taken into account as a form of higher-order reasoning.
This constraint arises because, as Siegel maintains, critical thinking occurs in the realm of first-order beliefs. In general, first-order beliefs are propositions that express direct observations about the sensible world, such as:
There are 25 people in the room.
A seminary is an appropriate place to hold a philosophy conference.
K-12 public schools in the state of Florida are experiencing political interference in their curriculum.
The idea of critical thinking is to subject these beliefs to the critical scrutiny of evidence. As David Owens (2000) in Reasons Without Freedom: The Problem of Epistemic Normativity maintains, the primary purpose of first-order deliberation is simply to conform the agent’s beliefs to the evidence (Owens, 2000).
Despite the seemingly common-sense appeal of critical thinking so conceived, one could argue there can be modifications to Siegel’s critical thinking method that can allow for better conformity with the presumed educational aims of a democratic society, if racial constructivism holds. To do so requires that the reasoner also participates in a metaprocess or second order reasoning that positions these beliefs within a historical frame of reference that racial constructivism posits. Owens (2000) decries that higher-order reflection can motivate the reasoner to respond to additional evidence. There is no indication that Siegel (2017) objects to this expansion of the evidence under consideration; however his critical account, by not incorporating racial constructivism, overlooks an illumination of potential sources of bias in the evidence available.
Paolo Freire’s (2000) Cultural Action for Freedom offers examples of this higher-order reasoning in socio-economically stratified societies of South American countries in the late twentieth century. In this cultural and historical context, Freire attempted to cultivate adult education students’ basic literacy. For the tenant farmers, Freire came to conclude that literacy instruction required fostering the capacity to call into question the latent messages of subordination and passivity in the curriculum. It is a disposition akin to critical literacy or the dictum, “Reading the world always precedes reading the word” (Freire and Slover, 1983, p. 10). At stake for the farmers was their liberation from the cycle of economic oppression that plagued them and their families for generation after generation. It was imperative for them to become critical consumers of their education and to ascertain the means by which the standard curriculum for adult literacy reinforced their subordinate social standing relative to the land-owning class.
The kind of instruction that Freire provided was a form of norm exposure that made explicit the ways that the R1↔R2 interrelation works, in this case, as the way that the farmers’ economic condition was intersubjectively related to the wealth of their land lords and in the social structure. Critical thinking that incorporates this higher-order process as meta-critical analysis would be of significant educational value. However, how is it to be attained? In this excerpt, Freire quotes from an adult reader text to show how standard literacy education could be impervious to the critical thinking that attends only to the logic/rationality of the example: Peter did not know how to read. Peter was ashamed. One day, Peter went to school and registered for a night course. Peter’s teacher was very good. Peter knows how to read now. Look at Peter’s face. . . . Peter is smiling. He is a happy man. He already has a good job. Everyone ought to follow his example. (Freire, 2000: 16)
How should the farmers view the reading content and its appropriateness? As Freire explains, In saying that Peter is smiling because he knows how to read, that he is happy because he now has a good job, and that he is an example for all to follow, the authors establish a relationship between knowing how to read and getting good jobs that, in fact cannot be borne out. . . Unable to grasp contemporary illiteracy as a typical manifestation of the ‘culture of silence’, . . . this approach cannot offer an objective, critical response to the challenge of illiteracy. (Freire, 2000: 17)
A higher-order critical analysis rightly places the reader in a dissonant relationship with the text that steps out of the taken-for-granted frame of reference. Freire continues, ‘Merely teaching men to read and write does not work miracles; if there are not enough jobs for men to work, teaching more men to read and write will not create them’ (p. 17). Similarly, teaching reasons assessment alone does not work miracles in a democratic society operating under the moral mandate of ensuring its long-term political sustainability; rather practices such as fostering a counter or resistant relationship to the text or school as text in relationship to higher-order consideration are needed. Merely linear evaluation that addresses the internal consistency of first-order claims and reasons for their support can fail to challenge the assumptions in given evidence or that cause a narrative to hang together seemingly coherently. This example suggests that critical thinking would benefit from a procedural addition that would equip thinkers to problematise these states of affairs or to not be complicit in accepting them at face value.
Chapter 15,‘Multiculturalism and Rationality,’ of Siegel’s text, tackles a broader question of whether cultures differ concerning venerating rationality and offers a sterling defence of the possibility of multiculturalism against Stanley Fish’s account to the contrary. The organising question of the chapter is whether differences in judgements or rationality track with differences in culture. Continuing the cultural difference advocacy account of multiculturalism, the chapter remarks that such a view ‘celebrates cultural differences; insists upon the just respectful treatment of all cultures, especially those persons whom have been historically the victims of domination and oppression; and emphasises the integrity of historically marginalised cultures’ (Siegel, 2017: 246). Given Fish’s critique about the inconsistency of such cultural differences, the chapter proposes reforming multiculturalism to overcome Fish’s criticism. Siegel writes that: A consistent multiculturalism should hold not that all cultures be viewed, valued, and treated in accordance with its dictates no matter what, but rather that particular cultures should be so viewed, valued, and treated only if they endorse the moral imperatives of multicultutralism themselves and view, value, and treat other cultures accordingly. (p. 243)
This commitment is to a ‘supracultural universal’ (p. 245) with which a coherent version of multiculturalism is compatible (p. 247).
Insofar as critical thinking is a claim to the preeminence of exercising rationality, it raises the question of whether conceding the supracultural universal is sufficient to foster a transcultural critical thinking. A thinking disposition is ‘a tendency, propensity, or inclination to think in certain ways under certain circumstances’ (p. 50). It is unclear that contexts that engender epistemological externalism of a supra-cultural universalism can have a causal relationship to the reasoner’s internal justification. Mills writes that an agentic bringing to bear of the political history is required: Epistemologically, a cognitive resistance to Herrenvolk theory will be necessary, the rejection of white mystification, the sometimes painful and halting development of faith in one’s own ability to know the world, and the articulation of different categories, the recovery of vanished or denied histories, the embarking upon projects of racial ‘vindication’. Somatically, since the physical body has itself become the vehicle of metaphysical status, since physiology has been taken to recapitulate ontology, resistance may also involve a physical transformation of the flesh, or of one’s attitude towards it. (Mills, 1994: 126)
There is the suggestion that passive analysis will not be sufficient and that the thinker should actively import these reasoning tools that racial constructivism encompasses.
Arguably, based on the socio-historical account of mind to which Siegel subscribes, the mind’s formation requires this higher-order component for a more incisive scrutiny of culturally imparted beliefs. Siegel’s conception of critical thinking presuppoes John McDowell’s ideas that, developmentally, formal and informal education are ‘initiation into the space of reasons.’ It is as Bakhurst describes McDowell’s’ idea that ‘the responsiveness to reasons’ constitute our ‘distinctly human mental powers that emerge through our induction into traditions of thinking’ (Bakhurst, 2011: 99). Siegel (2017) quotes McDowell at length in associating critical thinking with helping move an agent from naturalism to normativity in one’s thinking (p. 23). The backdrop of this view is that McDowell builds on Aristotle’s notion of ‘second nature’. This view holds that human animals possess a developing cognition that is permeated with rationality through reconciling ‘reason and nature’ in ordinary human experiences. Siegel emphasizes McDowell’s view that cognitive development is an outcome of one’s upbring that exposes persons to the space of reasons as formative. With time, there can be attunement to its regulative power.
Siegel argues that this eye-opening experience of being initiated into the space of reason is not limited merely to the ethical tract but is a general account of how one’s eyes are opened to reason at large. He writes, that ‘demands of reason are autonomous and independent from us in that these requirements and relationship are there whether we are responsive to them or not’ (Siegel, 2017: 26). Indeed, ‘the ideal requires that ordinary decent human upbringing and the acquisition of appropriate conceptual capacities – that is normal human development . . . be supplemented by explicit educational interventions aimed at enhancing students’ abilities to reason well’ (p. 28).
In the task of fostering the disposition to think critically in a society where there are diverse opinions and justifications rooted in cultural identification, it is crucial to recognise that the basis on which claims are criticised shows that second nature initiation can occur very differently based on one’s upbringing and that these orientations vary among persons, cultures and geographies that give rise to different frames of reference. Even the most vigilant persons, who seek to respond to reasons without fail can be beset by blind spots without the awareness that racial constructivism foregrounds. This pervasiveness of race cannot be accessed except through direct or indirect engagement with the associated biases and distortions of beliefs in higher order thinking. How much more is this the case when initiation in the space of reasons follows a different heuristic than the one with which one is acquainted.
Siegel maintains that the ‘potential significance’ of the space of reasons for educational theory and practice is to ‘(1) to demarcate a specific mode of intelligibility (2) to describe the site of the game of giving and asking for reasons; (3) to express the idea of reality as a normative space . . . For the first and third uses . . . their contribution lies in illuminating what we can call the circumstances of reason – the nature of our rational powers and the context of their acquisition and exercise’ (p. 115). These claims being the case does not obscure that the space of reasons is culturally dictated, where the agent reasons within the context of culture or race, from which no one in the United States is arguably free. Siegel (1999) acknowledges this point in the view that it is ‘uncontroversial . . . that all judgments of argument quality inevitably occur in the context of some cultural location . . .’ (p. 189). Siegel goes on to argue that the social locatedness of one’s argument does not entail that “achieving a perspective which would allow us to judge the quality of arguments in a culturally transcendent way” is not possible (p. 189). It can be argued that a higher- order scrutiny that racial constructivism imposes on reasoning and evidence for beliefs is a modality for cultural transendence.
Initiation into the space of reasons famously does not ensure that one’s reasoning is global or unbiased. For example, many would agree that Thomas Jefferson had ‘the most decent upbringing’ that McDowell references and had sufficient evidence to revise his views about intellectual capacities; nevertheless, he remained a stubborn proponent of relative White intellectual superiority. This perspective was fundamentally at odds with the letter and spirit of The Declaration of Independence regarding human equality. Moreover multiple contemporary counterexamples abounded in his claims of the inferiority of members of the African race. As Banneker wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1791: Here Sir, was a time in which your tender feelings for your selves had engaged you thus to declare, you were then impressed with proper ideas of the great valuation of liberty and the free possession of those blessings to which you were entitled by nature; but Sir how pitiable is it to reflect, that although you were so fully convinced of the benevolence of the Father of mankind, and of his equal and impartial distribution of those rights and privileges which he had conferred upon them, that you should at the same time counteract his mercies, in detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren under groaning captivity and cruel oppression, that you should at the same time be found guilty of that most criminal act, which you professedly detested in others, to yourselves. Sir, I suppose that your knowledge of the situation of my brethren is too extensive to need a recital here; neither shall I presume to prescribe methods by which they may be relieved; otherwise than by recommending to you and all others, to wean yourselves from these narrow prejudices which you have imbibed with respect to them, and as Job proposed to his friends ‘Put your Souls in their Souls stead’, thus shall your hearts be enlarged with kindness and benevolence toward them, and thus shall you need neither the direction of myself or others in what manner to proceed herein (Banneker, 1791).
This example illustrates that reasons assessment alone may be not sufficiently vigilant to overcome the lack of information or bias that lies within one’s frame of reference. Attention to judgement, in addition to reason, would preliminarily involve attention to matters such as fostering a deliberative space in the classroom and bringing in other frames of reference based on racial constructivism about the matter. Siegel’s theorisation does not, in principle, preclude this component. However, by attending more closely to more global reasoning, schools can more closely exemplify the deliberative spaces that a democratic society requires.
Conclusion
Mills’ carefully crafted architecture of the social ontology of race is a syncretic framework of metaphysics, political philosophy, and ethics. Drawing on the seminal categorization of two classes of persons in the racial contract, the aim of the paper was to analytically magnify the social components of the mechanism that Mills so artfully proposed. Extant concepts in metaphysics specify the ontological status and relations that can and should inform educational philosophy’s engagement with racial constructivism to fulfil democratic aims in the schools. Such a goal would lay the foundation for education to instantiate the dialogue among equals in a multicultural, multiracial, multicultural society.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the editors’ patience with the process of developing this suite of papers, and the extraordinary attentiveness to the paper’s argument. Their comments were invaluable.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
